Extensive Research Description

Broadly, our group is interested in cognitive neuroscience of psychiatric illness. We seek to better understand, at the neural system level, the neural mechanisms behind cognitive and affective deficits in neuropsychiatric illness. Specifically, the research in our group focuses on understanding these processes in schizophrenia, bipolar illness and addiction. We use a combination of tools to better understand the neural systems involved in processing affective stimuli and their interaction with neural systems involved in goal-directed cognitive operations such as working memory. Methodologically, our lab harnesses the combination of task-based, resting-state, pharmacological functional neuroimaging, as well as computational modeling approaches to mechanistically understand neural circuit dysfunction in psychiatric disorders. Our experimental approaches depend on the combination of these tools to better understand the mechanistic links between neural circuit dysfunction and complex cognitive and affective processes and behaviors. The overarching objective of the lab is better understand the underlying neural circuit dysfunction in complex mental illness such as schizophrenia, with the aim of developing better neural markers and informing rationally-guided pharmacological treatments.